Michael Leinbach - Bringing Columbia Home - The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

Typical of the KSC staff flying as spotters was NASA test project engineer Mike Ciannilli, who flew with a search crew out of Palestine. He had never been in a helicopter before, but he desperately wanted to help in the search for his beloved Columbia . Several days of crippling airsickness at the beginning of his assignment almost forced him out of the role. However, someone suggested that he ask the pilot to fly with the helicopter’s doors removed. The fresh, cold breeze helped reduce his nausea, and he was able to proceed in his role.

One of the challenges in spotting shuttle debris from the air was discerning it from the junk landowners left in remote corners of their property. Bathtubs turned up in strange places. On one flight, Ciannilli spotted what appeared to be a perfect piece of white tile in a swampy area that was miles from the nearest house. He asked the pilot to set down as close as possible to it, but the only safe area to land was several hundred yards away at the edge of the woods. Ciannilli slogged downstream through water and muck to reach the item, only to discover it was a Texas license plate.

Search teams needed to be aware of unofficial “no-fly” areas in the search area. On another of Ciannilli’s flights, the pilot received a call from the airborne control plane, “Abandon your search! Abandon your search!”

Ciannilli asked, “Are we low on fuel?”

The pilot said, “It’s not safe. We might get shot at. There’s a meth lab in this area.”

Dive teams from the FBI, EPA, coast guard, Houston police department, the Sabine River Authority, Jasper County sheriff’s office, and other local authorities had been searching the Toledo Bend Reservoir since February 1, following up on reports of large objects hitting the water. Unfortunately, dense fog covered the lake at the time of the accident, and few people were able to judge reliably where anything actually impacted. Their reports were actually classified as “ear witness” testimony. [24] US Navy, Salvage Report , 2–4.

The only thing recovered so far from Toledo Bend was a brake from one of Columbia ’s main landing gear assemblies. An FBI team found it in shallow water a few feet west of the Louisiana shoreline. Columbia ’s OEX recorder had not been found on the ground. NASA suspected it might have come down along the Texas side of the lake, since other items from the forward end of the shuttle were found onshore nearby.

The US Navy took over the water search and salvage operations in Toledo Bend and Lake Nacogdoches at about the same time the national Incident Management Teams took over the ground search. [25] Jerry Ross email to Jonathan Ward. NASA’s water search coordinators were astronauts Jim Reilly, Steve Bowen, and Keith Russell, assisted by a coast guard officer on loan to the Flight Crew Operations Directorate. The navy surveyed the areas of the reservoirs along the centerline of the debris path, and immediately saw the challenges they would be up against. Water temperatures were in the forties. Treetops, moss, and hydrilla just below the water’s surface restricted the depth at which salvage vessels could tow sonar devices. Suspended matter in the water limited divers’ visibility to just a few feet. Operators on the surface would need to use portable sonar devices to guide divers to areas of interest. Divers would have to wear special dry suits to protect them from potential exposure to toxic chemicals.

Searching for debris on the lake bottom was extraordinarily difficult, especially since the initial search area was over thirty-two square nautical miles of lake bed. When Toledo Bend’s dam was constructed in 1966, engineers expected it would take three years for the reservoir to fill with water. That would have allowed enough time to log the forested land and reclaim items from buildings in the reservoir. However, two back-to-back major floods caused Toledo Bend to fill up in only three months. [26] Texas Forest Service, “Situation Report Sunday Supplement: The Week in Review, April 13-20, 2003,” internal memo. There was not enough time to clear trees and remove equipment from the farms and logging operations, and all of that was now sitting at the bottom of the lake.

Consequently, the navy’s sonar picked up returns from myriad large and small metal objects on the lake bed—railroad tracks, tractors, cars, storage tanks, fence lines, and metal roofs on storage buildings. Even flat-topped tree stumps created sonar returns that appeared similar to potential targets of interest.

High winds prevented search teams from working on the lakes on February 21, 26, and March 29, but teams were otherwise in the water every day. They examined anywhere from twenty to more than one hundred targets of interest every day.

By March 2, the navy had not located any material from the shuttle in either Toledo Bend or Lake Nacogdoches. The navy asked NASA for some actual space shuttle material upon which the search teams could test their equipment. NASA provided four pieces of shuttle skin that had been recovered on land. The dive team tied the pieces to buoys and dropped them in about twenty feet of relatively clear water near the Fin and Feather Resort. The search equipment could only reliably detect the largest piece, which measured about three feet by six feet across. The reservoir was on average sixty feet deep, and more than one hundred feet deep in places. This did not bode well for finding small debris from the shuttle with the current resources. A higher-resolution sonar system brought in a few days later also had difficulty detecting small objects.

Nonetheless, analysts became proficient at identifying man-made objects in sonar scans and targeting dive teams to them. The recovered objects—none of which were from the shuttle—were proudly displayed against the wall of the dive headquarters. These trophies included a drywall bucket, anchors, outboard motors, and a refrigerator door. The materials were all about the same size and shape as the debris that NASA was most eager to find.

On March 18, NASA asked the navy to look in one area of Toledo Bend for a camera that could have recorded pictures of the shuttle’s external fuel tank. Someone said they had seen film or tapes along the edge of the reservoir, but they were lost when heavy rains raised the water level. [27] Greg Cohrs email to Jonathan Ward. Several pieces from a camera were found on the western shore, raising hopes the camera body might be in the lake.

The navy scanned the new area several times during the search for the camera. Divers spent 176 diving hours grid searching an area of about five and one-half acres. This concentrated search produced only a single, thumbnail-sized piece of shuttle skin. While searchers were no doubt frustrated to have found nothing of consequence from Columbia in Toledo Bend, they demonstrated that searches with high-tech systems were not missing any significant pieces of shuttle debris. [28] US Navy, Salvage Report , sections 2–5.

On February 18, a Sabine County resident who was four-wheeling near the bank of an inlet near Six Mile Bay on Toledo Bend spotted Columbia ’s nose landing gear partially buried in the mud. That afternoon, a pickup truck brought the nose gear to the collection center at the Sabine County rodeo arena.

As Pat Adkins cleaned off the piece with a hose and scrub brush, he reflected on how bizarre the situation was. Here he was, standing in the bed of a pickup truck, washing mud off of a once-pristine piece of the shuttle. Unlike some other items of debris that were almost unrecognizable, there was no mistaking what this was. Both tires were still attached to the strut. The bead of the tires was burned off, and they were deflated, but the tires were otherwise remarkably intact. The stroke arm for the steering actuator was missing, and Adkins could see that one portion of the surface of the strut had been exposed to the heat of reentry. After cleaning it off, Adkins and several other men transferred the landing gear to the back of a semitrailer, where it could be kept secure until the next shipment of debris from Hemphill to Barksdale.